OtherSelf-paced puzzle path, a few hours; 500+ further practice challenges·Free

CyLab Security Academy AI Foundations Learning Path (formerly picoCTF)

4.4

The picoCTF team at CMU rebranded as CyLab Security Academy and added an AI Foundations path. It is free, aimed at students and teachers, and teaches AI the way picoCTF taught security: by making you poke at things. It is an introduction, not a professional AI security course.

What We Liked

Completely free, including the classroom tools teachers use to assign challenges and track progress
Built by the same CMU team that has run picoCTF for over a decade, so the puzzle design is mature
Covers perceptrons and neural networks as well as hallucinations, prompt engineering and governance, which is a better spread than most beginner AI courses
Explicitly teaches the difference between an AI assistant and an autonomous agent, and why handing an agent your credentials is a risk
Old picoCTF accounts created before 8 May 2026 carry over with progress intact

What Could Be Better

Pitched at students and beginners, so working engineers will finish it quickly
The AI security challenge domain (prompt injection, adversarial examples, model inversion) is still small next to the classic categories
The rename is confusing: picoCTF.org now points to a new domain, picoCTF.com is listed as coming soon, and most tutorials online still use the old names
No certificate with any hiring weight, which is fine for the audience but worth knowing

Detailed review

picoCTF has been the gateway CTF for students for more than a decade, run out of Carnegie Mellon's CyLab. On 8 May 2026 the team moved the whole thing to a new home called CyLab Security Academy at cylabacademy.org. The practice gym is still there with more than 500 challenges across the usual categories, the annual competition still runs (the 2026 edition was 9 to 19 March), and old accounts still work. The new part is the AI Foundations Learning Path, launched on 17 July 2026. It is a puzzle-based path that mixes short explanations of how machine learning works with hands-on exercises and choose-your-own-adventure scenarios.

It starts at the perceptron and goes through neural networks, hallucinations, prompt engineering and AI governance. The section I liked most is on agents. It separates an assistant that answers questions from an agent that takes actions, and then makes the point that the person who set the agent loose is still responsible for what it does, including keeping credentials away from it. That is a lesson plenty of adults in industry have not learned yet. The scope is honest about who it is for.

This is AI literacy with a security lens, built for students, teachers and curious beginners. It is not going to teach you to red team a production RAG system. The separate machine learning challenge domain, which covers prompt injection, adversarial examples and model inversion, is where things get more technical, but it is still a small slice of a platform that grew up around crypto, forensics and binary exploitation. The teacher side is where it beats most free AI courses. You can assign challenges, see student progress automatically and run class-only events, and CMU says it is in more than 14,000 classrooms.

Most free AI literacy material is a slide deck and a quiz. This gives a teacher something students actually do. My main gripe is the branding mess. Search for picoCTF and you land on a page telling you it is now something else, with picoCTF.com marked as coming soon. If you are sharing it with students, give them the cylabacademy.org link directly. Overall, I rate it highly for what it is: a free, well-made, hands-on introduction to AI and its risks from a team with a long record in security education.

Just do not mistake it for professional training.

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The verdict.

If you teach high school or intro university classes, this is the easiest free way to get AI literacy and AI risk into a lesson plan. If you are a developer wanting to attack LLM apps, use it as a warm-up and move on to PortSwigger's LLM labs or a hands-on certification.